Neither Romeo nor nudity makes an appearance in Juliet, Naked,a labored romantic comedy adapted from Nick Hornby’s 2009 novel. In fact, there isn’t even a title character—Juliet is the name of an album by fictional indie rocker Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), who disappeared between sets of a gig back in the ’90s, never…

Most films adapted from memoirs come across as stranger than fiction. It’s not Billy Moore’s fault that his experiences—recounted in the 2014 best-seller A Prayer Before Dawn: My Nightmare In Thailand’s Prisons—call to mind a host of previous movies, albeit combining what are usually two separate genres. What begins…

Movies about the fantastic often begin by establishing a patina of normalcy, the better to rupture it later. Like anything else, these initial, comparatively ordinary scenes can be executed skillfully or poorly; some feel like a waste of time (“Get to the good stuff!”), whereas others whet the appetite for what’s to…

The first and second murders in The Third Murder take place some 30 years before the movie begins, and are never shown on screen, even in flashback. No need to wait around for number three, though. Just a few seconds into the very first shot, a middle-aged man named Misumi (Kôji Yakusho), who’s walking with another…

Playing a quadriplegic represents a challenge for any able-bodied actor, but it must be particularly frustrating for someone like Joaquin Phoenix, who uses his body no less expressively than he does his face and voice. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot largely confines Phoenix to a motorized wheelchair, though…

It’s hard not to feel empathy for a child who finds herself abruptly sent back to a birth country she doesn’t even remember—that’s why a path to citizenship or legal residency for DACA recipients has comparatively broad bipartisan support, even as every other element of immigration policy remains deeply polarized.…

A familiar tale told with intense conviction, Clio Barnard’s Dark River depicts two adult lives still caught in the undertow of childhood trauma. Alice (Ruth Wilson) has just returned to the English farm where she grew up, having spent the past 15 years as an itinerant worker all over the globe; her father recently…

There are three different potential audiences for the documentary Three Identical Strangers: 1) people for whom that title signifies nothing in particular; 2) people who’ll immediately recognize which ’80s human-interest news story the film must recount, but only know the basics; and 3) a handful of folks familiar…

Mob boss John Gotti—dubbed the “Teflon Don” after repeatedly being acquitted of crimes that he’d obviously committed—often sported a knowing smirk in public, taking evident pleasure in having literally gotten away with murder. Precious little of that mocking arrogance turns up in Gotti, a weirdly fawning biopic…

Frank Fisher (Nick Offerman), the widowed protagonist of Hearts Beat Loud, dotes on his teenage daughter. Also, he possesses a very particular set of skills. Unfortunately for Frank, his skill set mostly involves retail music sales, which makes him reliant on the tiny handful of people—even in trendy Red Hook,…

The line that once clearly separated documentaries from fictional narratives has eroded so much that certain films are tricky to classify. Errol Morris’ Wormwood,for example, is generally considered to be a doc, even though much of its four-hour running time consists of actors performing scripted scenes. On the flip…

In movies, as in politics, it’s not necessarily advantageous to acknowledge that everyday problems are often insurmountably complicated, with no easy answers. One of the best films released last year, From Nowhere,was seen by almost nobody (not even by critics, excepting those of us who were assigned to review it);…

The autobiographical childhood reminiscence, while naturally appealing to fledgling filmmakers in search of material (“Write what you know,” etc.), can be tricky to pull off. Unless your formative years were unusually eventful—spent fashioning a playground from the rubble of buildings bombed in the Blitz, for…

Watch Thisoffers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. The summer movie season is upon us, which means its time for a semi-annual tradition: singing the praises of the most unloved, underperforming, or simply forgotten summer blockbusters.

Sponsored content has begun creeping its way into movie theaters, via a new phenomenon in which organizations commission world-class filmmakers to deliver their message, disguised as ordinary documentaries. Werner Herzog, it turned out, couldn’t be entirely tamed: His recent doc Lo And Behold, though ostensibly a…

There are only two characters of any real significance in Beast, the debut feature from British filmmaker Michael Pearce, and its title could plausibly refer to either one of them. We’re first introduced to Moll (Jessie Buckley), a timid-looking young woman who understandably gets annoyed when her birthday party—at…

Americans of a certain age, for whom The Day After conjures terrifying images of nuclear apocalypse (thanks to a 1983 TV-movie of that title), can rest easy. Nothing remotely momentous ever happens in the films of Korean director Hong Sang-soo, and The Day After—one of three features he premiered last year, arriving…

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull very nearly shares a birthday with cinema itself: The play had its world premiere on October 17, 1896, about a year after the Lumière brothers publicly showed some of the very first motion pictures ever made. Yet there’s never been a definitive cinematic adaptation, nor even a very notable…